Songs of Thankfulness and Praise
Songs of Thankfulness and Praise
Sung in Worship: January 12, 2025
Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885), brought up in Essex, where his father was a priest, attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge (where his father was then Master). A brilliant classical scholar, he won many prizes, including one for the best translation of Shakespeare into Greek verse.He was elected a Fellow of Trinity in 1830 and then spent two years in Greece, where he discovered the site of the Oracle of Dodona; he wrote Athens and Attica after that trip. Wordsworth was ordained to the priesthood in 1835 and Appointed University Orator in 1836. He spent a brief time as Headmaster of Harrow and then was appointed a Canon of Westminster Abbey with the living of a parish in Berkshire, where he served until in 1869 Disraeli appointed him Bishop of Lincoln. Wordsworth published a book on inscriptions at Pompei as well as a second book about Greece: he also published a memoir of his uncle, the poet William Wordsworth. In addition to these works, he published several volumes of lectures and sermons, but his primary work was his multi-volume commentary on the entire Bible (1856-1870). Finally, he published a volume of hymns, The Holy Year; or Hymns for Sundays and Holidays Throughout the Year, and for Other Occasions, 1862, with several editions to 1872. In that volume, “Songs of thankfulness and praise “ is designed for the 6th Sunday after the Epiphany as the culmination of a series of Epiphany hymns. It begins with the epiphany to the magi and then refers to the revelation at the baptism of Jesus, the miracle he performs at the wedding in Cana, the various healings he performs and the confrontation with Satan in the desert.The fourth stanza presents the apocalypse and the last the second coming, the “great Epiphany.”
The tune “Salzburg,” is by Jakob Hintze (1622-1702), the son of a town musician in a small town near Berlin, later himself a town musician and then, in 1666, Court Musician to Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg. After the death in 1662 of Johann Krüger, the longtime editor of Praxis Pietatis Melica (Musical Practice of Piety), Hintze was invited by a Berlin publisher to take on the editorship. He oversaw 16 further editions of the work, adding many of his own melodies. This melody first appeared in 1678, in the 19th edition, without a title, of course. The tune seems to have been called “Salzburg” first in 1861 by the editors of Hymns Ancient and Modern, who used it for “At the Lamb’s high feast we sing.” They adopted the tune with harmonization attributed to J.S. Bach, but possibly by Johann Pachelbel.